After six TV series from 2013 to 2022, which caused a worrying surge in flat cap-wearing among well-to-do men in country pubs, Peaky Blinders is now getting a hefty standalone feature film, a muscular picture swamped in mud and blood. This is the movie version of Steven Knight’s global small-screen hit, based on the real-life gangs that swaggered through Birmingham from Victorian times until well into the 20th century. Cillian Murphy returns with his uniquely unsettling, almost sightless stare as Tommy Shelby, family chieftain of a Romani-traveller gang, a man who has converted his trauma in the trenches of the first world war into a ruthless determination to survive and rule.

As we join the story some years after the curtain last came down, it is 1940, Britain’s darkest hour and Tommy is the crime-lion in winter. He now lives in a huge, remote mansion, far from the Birmingham crime scene he did so much to create, alone except for his henchman Johnny Dogs, played by Packy Lee. Evidently wearied and sickened by it all, Tommy is haunted by his ghosts and demons: memories of his late brother, Arthur, and dead daughter, Ruby, and working on what will be his definitive autobiography. (Sadly, we don’t get any scenes of Tommy having lunch with a drawling London publisher or agent.)

But a charismatic and beautiful woman, played by Rebecca Ferguson, brings Tommy news of what we already know: his malign idiot son Erasmus Shelby, played by Barry Keoghan, is now running the Peaky Blinders, a new gen-Z-style group of flatcappers raiding government armouries for guns that should really belong to the military. And if that wasn’t disloyal and unpatriotic enough, Erasmus has accepted a secret offer from a sinister Nazi fifth-columnist called Beckett, played by Tim Roth, to help distribute counterfeit currency which will destroy the economy and make Blighty easier to invade. Doesn’t Erasmus know what Adolf Hitler is going to do to his own Romani people? (To be fair to Erasmus, a lot of the poshest and most well-connected people in the land didn’t either.)

Clearly, Tommy is going to have to come down there and sort this mess out. And we get a very ripe scene in which soft-spoken Tommy turns up in the pub full of raucous idiots who cheek him. “Who the faaaaaack is ‘Tommy Shelby’?” sneers one lairy squaddie, who gets horribly schooled on that very subject.

In this movie, Tommy Shelby is against the Nazis, and he can’t get to be more of a good guy than that. (Tommy has evidently put behind him memories of Winston Churchill from the first two series, when Churchill was dead set on clamping down on the Peaky Blinders.) The war and the Nazis are a big theme for a big-screen treatment and screenwriter Knight and director Tom Harper put it across with some gusto as a kind of homefront war film, helped by their effortlessly watchable lead. Maybe you have to be fully invested in the TV show to really like it, although this canonisation of Tommy is a sentimental treatment of what we actually know of crime gangs in the second world war. Nevertheless, it is a resoundingly confident drama.

That’s both a promise and a challenge she delivers, since what follows may rub some viewers the wrong way. Yet Gyllenhaal’s full-throttle commitment to her vision is compelling in and of itself, and she has marshalled an absolutely smashing-looking and -sounding production. The story proper begins in 1936 Chicago, which, like everything and everyplace else in the movie, has been luminously shot by cinematographer Lawrence Sher and sumptuously conjured by production designer Karen Murphy. Her involvement is appropriate given that her previous credits include Bradley Cooper’s A STAR IS BORN and Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS, since among other things, THE BRIDE! is a nostalgic musical. Its Frankenstein (Christian Bale), who has taken the name of his maker, is obsessed with big-screen tuners, and imagines himself in elaborate song-and-dance numbers. (Considering the reception to JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX, one must applaud the daring of Warner Bros. for greenlighting another expensive film in which a tormented protagonist has that kind of fantasy life.)

THE BRIDE! may be revisionist on many levels, but its characterization of its “monster” holds true to past screen incarnations from Karloff’s to Elordi’s: His scarred appearance masks a lonely soul who desires companionship. Frankenstein has arrived in Chicago to seek out Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening), correctly believing she has the scientific know-how to create an appropriate mate for him. Rather than piece one together, Dr. Euphronious resurrects the corpse of Ida (Jessie Buckley), whose consorting with underworld types led to her brutal death. Previously chafing against the man’s world she inhabited in life, she becomes even more defiant and unruly as a revenant, apparently possessed by the spirit of Shelley herself, declaiming in free-associative sentences and quoting rebellious literature.

Buckley, currently an Oscar favorite for her very different literary-inspired role in HAMNET, tears into the role of the Bride (who now goes by the name Penny) with invigorating abandon that bursts off the screen. Unsure of her identity yet overflowing with self-confident bravado, she’s the opposite of the sensitive “Frank,” but they’re united by the world that stands against them. That becomes literal when a violent incident sends them on the lam, road-tripping to New York City and beyond, on a trail inspired by the films of Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), Frank’s favorite song-and-dance-man star.

With THE BRIDE!, Gyllenhaal has made a film that’s at once her very own and a feverish homage to all sorts of cinema past and present. It’s a horror story, a lovers-on-the-run movie, a crime thriller, a musical and more, and historical fealty be damned if it makes for a good scene (as when Penny and Frank sneak into a 3D movie over a decade before such features became popular). In-references are everywhere: It might just be a coincidence that the couple’s travels take them past Fredonia, NY (cf. “Freedonia” in the Marx Brothers’ DUCK SOUP), but it’s certainly no accident that the former Ida is targeted by a crime boss named Lupino, referencing the actress and pioneering filmmaker whose works included noirs and women’s-issues stories. Penny’s exploits lead legions of admiring women to adopt her look and anarchic attitude, echoing the first JOKER (while a headline calls them “Twisted Sisters”), and the use of one Irving Berlin song in a Frankensteinian context immediately recalls a classic comedic take on the property.

Whether the audience should be put in mind of a spoof at a key point in a film with different goals is another matter. At times like these, Gyllenhaal’s pastiche ambitions overtake emotional investment in the story. As strong as the two lead performances are (Bale is quite moving, conveying a great deal of soul from behind his extensive prosthetics), it’s easier to feel for them in individual scenes than during the entire course of the just-over-two-hour running time. The diversions can be entertaining, to be sure, but they also result in an uncertainty of tone. The dissonance continues straight through to the end, where the filmmaker’s choice of closing-credits song once again suggests we’re not supposed to take all this too seriously.

There’s nonetheless much to admire and enjoy about THE BRIDE!, and this kind of risk-taking by a major studio is always to be encouraged (especially considering that we’ll see how long that lasts at Warner Bros. once Paramount takes it over). Beyond the terrific work by the aforementioned actors, there’s fine support from Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz as detectives on Penny and Frank’s heels, with Sandy Powell’s lavish costumes and Hildur Guðnadóttir’s rich, varied score vital to fashioning this fully imagined world. Kudos also to makeup and prosthetics designer Nadia Stacey and to Chris Gallaher and Scott Stoddard, who did those honors on Frank, for their visceral, evocative work. Uneven as it may be, THE BRIDE! is also as alive! as any film you’ll likely see this year.

The action is relentless in the complex thriller In Cold Light, a tense combination of crime and fugitive tale and family drama. It is the third feature and first English language film by Maxime Giroux, best known for a very different kind of film, the critically acclaimed 2014 drama Felix & Meira.